Explore Our Core Focus Areas
Our Center provides evidence-based expertise, tools, programs, and training to promote injury prevention in policy and practice. To stay informed on events and updates at the Center, subscribe to our e-newsletter.
Connect With Our Experts
Our injury prevention experts are available for:
- Providing evidence-based recommendations to the media, policymakers, advocates, health care providers, and the public
- Collaboration to inform quality research and translate research into practice
- Training for students and other injury prevention professionals in the practice of injury prevention
- Technical assistance to agencies and organizations seeking to implement injury prevention solutions
Our efforts comprise outreach, teaching, research, and publications across the four broad topic areas below.
Safety In and Around the Home
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Reducing Home Injury Hazards. The Children’s Housing Assessment for a Safer Environment (CHASE) was developed to provide a systematic assessment to report on the prevalence of specific housing-related hazards.
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Helping Elders Age in Place. The Community Aging in Place – Advanced Better Living for Elders (CAPABLE) program is a client-centered home-based intervention to increase mobility, functionality, and capacity to “age in community” for low-income older adults
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Promoting Fire Safety. Our faculty collaborate with fire departments throughout the US to help implement evidence-based solutions for smoke alarms distribution programs, home safety visits and community risk reduction.
Substance Use, Drug Overdose, and Opioids
- Researching Policies to Prevent Drug Overdose. Center faculty use legal, qualitative, and quantitative research methods to analyze whether and how polies are impacting the drug overdose epidemic.
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Translating Research into Action. The Center has produced multiple reports and hosted online forums to help state and local health officers, policymakers, health care providers, and faith leaders identify actionable steps driven by the current state of the science to reduce overdose in their communities.
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Identifying Safe Medication Storage Solutions. Center faculty are studying innovative ways for consumers to safely and securely store medications in their home to reduce the risk of theft and diversion.
Road Safety and Safe Systems
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Convening Transportation Experts to make Consensus Recommendations. The Center brought together a panel of engineers, scientists, public health professionals and safety experts to consider a Safe Systems approach to transportation safety and develop consensus recommendations to eliminate traffic deaths and injuries.
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Building Technologies to Keep New Drivers Safe. Our faculty are designing and testing new, state-of-the-art technologies to help novice drivers stay safe on the roads ranging from a smartphone app to track driver behavior to innovative features for autonomous vehicles.
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Improving Child Passenger Safety. Safety in Seconds is a smartphone app developed by Center faculty to deliver tailored injury prevention education to users about child passenger safety. The program was tested in a randomized trial and found to improve safety behaviors among parents of young children.
Violence and Suicide Prevention
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Advancing Evidence-Based Suicide Prevention. Center faculty work closely with partners on-the-ground to offer evidenced based solutions to address suicide risk.
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Evaluating Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Strategies. Center faculty are conducting a national survey to assess the impact of child sexual abuse prevention efforts within youth-serving organizations.
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Advising State Rape Prevention Education Programs. The Center provides technical assistance to programs within Maryland to advance programming for sexual assault prevention and education.